Anyone else hope MS increases the Series X dashboard to 4k over 1080p?
- Thread starter SRTtoZ
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Based on this it sounds like the ram allocation is the same as the PS4. So 3.5 I guess?
I was concerned that such a rich level of functionality may well be taking system resources away from the game developer, whether that's in terms of CPU time, GPU or memory. Sony isn't giving away any numbers on what the system allocation is, and neither is it confirming how much useable space is available on the SSD. However, the aim is to deliver the new features with the same kind of system allocation developers currently work with on current-gen platforms.
"Hardware resource is limited and defined, and it's shared between the game and our system side," confirms Hideaki Nishino. "We define how much of the resource can be spent by the system side, but it's a similar amount [to] what we are doing with PlayStation 4. That's a philosophical thing: we are trying to give as much power and resource as possible back to the game side, because the game is the core, and then we bring Control Centre and Activity Cards while minimising the [system] resources we spend."
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Yea screw the 4K dashboard. It's ok as it is. An entire gig of extra RAM for games its where it's at. Can't wait until we get over this cross-gen parity phase with these games that are taking zero advantage of the Series X's power and resources. Next few years are going to be great.
It's a 7 year console cycle. Can you explain why you expect all hardware resources to be fully utilized in the first few months?
The common consensus around the PS5's (current) superior performance is that it's down to much more mature dev tools.
I don't even care, lol. It looks fine. I have both consoles and switch between them a lot, difference is meh. I just want the UIs to be fast and laid out good.
The PS5 Dashboard is also a skeleton of a system UI, like, it's about the minimum level of function you could possibly expect of a console. It's a silly comparison.
To be fair, the UX on Xbox One suffered because it ran on a mobile processor and an HDD while being heavily depended on the network.
If they somehow manage to make the UI on a Zen 2 12TF machine with an SSD slow I will laugh for days :P
How so? They are both very flawed IMO and could use a ton of improvements. One of my biggest pet peeves with Xbox is how they only show a handful of recent games up top, for all of your installed games you have to navigate to sub menu. And what's up with "suggested games" group which isn't removable? What's the point of showing some random games from my library, some of them installed, while others not installed.
PS5 isn't that much better, has its own share of annoyances.
I still notice occasional lag after cold boot when navigating.
I mean, you can pin whatever games you want on xbox, and the library is only like one click away from anywhere. You don't have to scroll all the way to the right first.
It shows the most recent 6 games/apps right there in a line to the right, basically just like ps5, but your library is also just 'down' once. Then you can arrange your folders/groups/whateveryouwant by hitting customize on the dash, and have your pins right underneath the most recent row of shit as well, which you can pin absolutely anything you want to.
It's honestly not THAT different from the XBO UI of like 5 years ago, but little tweaks all over have made it highly functional and snappy. Everything you want is right there.
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I won't! Knock on wood.
But in all honesty I'd rather they prioritize allowing custom dynamic backgrounds from users and third-parties and rebuild their UI around it over bumping up the res to 4k. I mean I complained about the Switch being 720p way back but I soon realised that I didn't care for that either lol
Pinning feature is pretty terrible because games that you uninstall still remain pinned, so I ended up micro managing these pesky thumbnails all the time. I gave up on using that and now just go to "my games & apps" where I can actually see currently installed games and nothing else.
If it happens, great. I can't say it's something I really care about though, as it's fine as it is.
Ok? So what's your beef I guess? Literally 'down' 'a' like, short of them dedicating a button on the controller to opening your library that's about as fast as you can expect anything to be.
Compare to the alternative of 'hit right 8 times, press X, then press up then right then back down' if you want to view your installed games. That's way more egregious than some barely noticeable aliasing on the text in my UI because it's not native 4k.
It asks you if you want to remove the pins when you uninstall.
The OS looks fine as it is, but it would be nice if it happened. It doesn't have to be on the top priority list for MS.
Couldn't care less, I legit forgot this was even a thing. Like someone else said, fixing quick resume or letting me manually scale custom backgrounds to fit the whole image I want in are more important than the resolution by far.
So PS5 is providing less RAM for games but still matching and sometimes exceeding XSX performance? PS5 is a beast!
I can't even notice and don't care. If it was 4k, and they decided to backtrack to free up any resources for games years in, I would support it gladly.
The biggest reason is that unlike the PlayStation's and Xbox 360 before it, the X1 /XS don't use a purpose built, dedicated UI layer for the console, and instead uses a **very* general purpose UI layer (UWP XAML) that is optimised for general UI development and doesn't - and won't - have any specific low level, case by case optimisation.
It means its less efficient overall in terms of performance and RAM usage, but it also means its ridiculously easier and quicker for Microsoft to iterate and change their UI because they're using a mature and fully fledged UI stack with a lot of tooling, documentation and flexibility, and their developers have a lotmof experience with it. (The Windows 10 shell is even built with UWP XAML these days)
And every layer / element on the UI gets its own render texture rather than being flattened on top of each other. So even a simple game tile has a BGRA background image texture, an A8 texture for the text label and a texture BGRA texture for a colour behind the label that get placed on top of each each other, rather than creating a single composite texture.
Which makes sense for a general purpose UI system because we don't know who needs to be redrawn when, and don't want the cost of redrawing entire cascading trees constantly, but means when you increase resolution, you can get a lot of potential memory increase - but not even close to 1GB from XAML elements alone. The biggest increase is probably literally from the resolution of the bitmap image assets like game art and full screen background art - and the of course, all the apps would also render in 4K with their own increased memory usage, taking up parts of the allocated Windows side of the memory pool
It is, however, literally a case of them flipping a switch to get it to happen for the most part. XAML was designed even in the old WPF days to scale perfectly with DPI/ resolution, so if they told it to render at 4K right now, it would, with very little work.
For sure.
There was a big thread out a month or so back when it first got revealed that it was going to be in 1080 again like the one x.
I thought it was annoying as ps4 pro had it in 4k and ms still supposedly can't figure a way to run the dash in 4k but things like ps4 pro, ps5 and apple TV 4k can do it. The Apple TV 4k and ps5 dash look so clean and clear with great images and text whilst ms still sits on blurry 1080.
There was a big thread out a month or so back when it first got revealed that it was going to be in 1080 again like the one x.
I thought it was annoying as ps4 pro had it in 4k and ms still supposedly can't figure a way to run the dash in 4k but things like ps4 pro, ps5 and apple TV 4k can do it. The Apple TV 4k and ps5 dash look so clean and clear with great images and text whilst ms still sits on blurry 1080.
So your argument is that over time the extra GB saved will cause Series X games to perform better? I don't buy that at all.
Thanks, this is super insightful and extremely detailed. I've very little to virtually no experience with teams working on UWA apps or developing UIs for Windows using XAML, but this all makes sense as explained. Really appreciate you taking the time to type it all out.
My thoughts had also been that the vast majority of increased memory usage would have to be higher res BMPs for things like game cover art and backgrounds, but it still seems unlikely that puts the increase at 1GB, all things considered.
Tbh with it being a flat design a flat design I don't even notice it that much.
Ofc a crisper display would be nice but it impacts me in no way what so ever. If their alleged performance benefits/gains then even better.
Ofc a crisper display would be nice but it impacts me in no way what so ever. If their alleged performance benefits/gains then even better.
The flat design makes it more strange. It should be very easily designed by scalable objects like in any other GUI for phones or computers.
Are you seriously implying that launch titles and crossgen titles are optimized in such a way that both systems are utilized to their fullest? Furthermore, the UI is mainly about RAM. Not exactly to do with framerate stability or whatever.
on the ps4 pro there are some games when i open the dashboard midgame, it literally takes 20-30 sec to navigate to a menu because its so laggy. Never had that on the X1x.
None of these cross-gen games are taking advantage of the Series X. Sucks but true. Late and immature tools are a thing unfortunately. I reckon by mid next year the pendulum will start swinging the other way in a more definitive way.
It's a little irksome but it's ultimately just a UI that gets me to the actual content so I won't be losing any sleep over it. Plus, if I can deal with the shithouse 720p Switch home screen blown up on my 65" 4K TV, I can stomach the 1080p Xbox dash.
Are you seriously pushing an argument that games don't benefit from having more VRAM?
I didn't even know this (65 inch OLED here) until I read it a few weeks ago. So... hmm... yeah they can, but not very high on my must have list TBH.
I just couldn't care less to be honest. Unless it takes away resource available from games. If so, leave it.
The resolution is the least of my concern because I find the UI on series X to be horrendous to begin with. Still not used to it. The PS5 ui looks much more polished from what I have seen. But it just might be a personal opinion.
I know like 10% of those specific terms but somehow you explained it super well... impressive!